From the opening line — It was during the time I wandered about and starved in Christiania: Christiania, this singular city, from which no man departs without carrying away the traces of his sojourn there.— Hunger, the 1890 novel by Norwegian author Knut Hamsun, pulls us into the narrator’s inner and outer worlds. This compelling story of […]
Tag Archives: fiction
June
03
Therese Raquin: A novel of passion and crime by Emile Zola
posted by sugarskullpress
First published in 1890, Therese Raquin — Emile Zola’s classic tale of forbidden love and murder — has served as the basis for television programs, radio plays, operas, movies (including 2013’s In Secret starring Jessica Lange and Elizabeth Olsen), and stage plays (including the 2015 Broadway production starring Keira Knightley). The story follows impoverished orphan […]
May
12
L.A. SLEEPERS, a Hollywood Ghostwriter Mystery by Dakota Donovan
posted by sugarskullpress
When elderly Hollywood producer Milton Kingman says he’s dying and needs someone to write his memoir, Dakota Donovan takes the job. The pay is lousy and the hours are worse, but the ghostwriter has no other options at the moment. What starts out as a standard “as told to” assignment soon becomes a long, strange […]
May
12
The Haunted Hotel by Wilkie Collins
posted by sugarskullpress
First published in 1878, The Haunted Hotel is among the later works of Wilkie Collins, famous for his 1868 novel The Moonstone, widely considered as the first modern English detective novel. The Haunted Hotel is notable for its atmosphere–a decaying palace in Venice–as well as intrigue among members of the aristocracy. “Wilkie Collins invented the […]
October
09
The Detective Stories of Edgar Allan Poe featuring C. Auguste Dupin
posted by sugarskullpress
“It is because I liked Edgar Allan Poe’s stories so much that I began to make suspense films.” ALFRED HITCHCOCK “Where was the detective story until Poe breathed the breath of life into it?” ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE “Mr. Poe has that indescribable something that men have agreed to call genius.” JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL “Poe constantly and inevitably produced […]
October
05
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Mystery & Fantasy Stories
posted by sugarskullpress
Mystery & Fantasy Stories features four mysterious and fantastic tales from America’s premier author, F. Scott Fitzgerald. The volume includes “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” the short story that served as the basis for the 2008 film starring Brad Pitt. “Fitzgerald had one of the rarest qualities in all of literature…the word is charm…a […]
October
05
Ghost Stories by Edith Wharton
posted by sugarskullpress
Ghost Stories features ten ghostly tales of the Gilded Age from one of America’s finest writers — Edith Wharton (1862-1937), author of The Age of Innocence, winner of the 1920 Pulitzer Prize. “Wharton’s graceful sentences create dramatic, populous tableaux and peel back layer after layer of artifice and pretense, of what we say and how […]
September
21
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
posted by sugarskullpress
The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebody happened to say that it was the only case he had met in which such […]
September
21
Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
posted by sugarskullpress
“…Stevenson’s short novel, written in 1885, is one of the ancestors of the modern mystery story…not only a good ‘bogey story,’ as Stevenson exclaimed when awakening from a dream in which he had visualized it…It is also, and more importantly, a fable that lies nearer to poetry than to ordinary prose fiction, and therefore belongs […]
Sugar Skull Press 